Train Spotting

Today was trying to explore some of the highlights of Tokyo. And seemingly after two weeks of shooting all over the place with Japan's train system, it turned into a bit of a train spotting day.

Of course we headed for the Tokyo International Forum as a known vantage point only to be disappointed; the best spot was behind a "Staff Only" barrier! Whether this was permanent or there were just conferences there today is unknown. But we had to settle for a lower vantage point in a neighboring building.

Amongst Tokyo's highlights is of course the famous Shibuya crossing. At least that's what most of the world calls it. On the local signs it's called "Scramble Crossing" and I have to admit that the name really does fit. I'm a little surprised I had not noticed that name before. Though I'll admit I don't spend a lot of time trying to navigate Shibuya by the signs usually given that it's a hard landmark to miss once you're above ground.

Getting back to the theme of trains though, I somehow managed to find a driver that really seemed like it might be worth going back to school for a bit. The stopping position for trains is fairly well set, with stickers telling you where the doors will be, and a lot of platforms these days also have doors on the platform side making the stopping point even more important. My driver managed to stop short on two stations such that they had to start the train again to move it the last 2 meters, came into one stop at an absolute crawl, and managed to overshoot one station such that he actually had to reverse! With the conductor of course profusely apologizing the entire time. Given that I was with the train for only 7 stations, that's ... not a good success ratio.

After my last Ramen experiment, I needed to try the Ramen in Akihabara again that I was raging so much about last trip. Only problem, the only thing I remembered about its location was "Akihabara", as I was pretty lost when I stumbled into it last time. So I tried the same approach: get lost, walk around randomly, hope to get lucky. It was a crap approach, and it found me the place within 2 minutes. Um ... yay? The Ramen was ... good, but possibly not quite as rave worthy as I made it out to be last time. I suspect it was more of a "finally!" moment, similarly to what I had with the first good Ramen in Umeda earlier this trip. Still not bad, but probably not a requirement to find next time.